On the subject of Email marketing

Rob

You may have noticed that AOL recently rolled out a new web based mail client for AOL.com. As part of this change, they are now disabling images by default. AOL are not alone in doing this and they are among a dominant group of clients that block images by default. So the result is that you just have to expect that a vast majority of your contacts will first see your message without images; it’s just a fact of life.

What can be done?

Hopefully most contacts will choose to turn images back on by default, but not everyone will choose not to do this. For those customers who won’t add your From to their address book, and who haven’t turned images on, you need to take the next step: Alternate Text.

Setting Alternate Text

What is Alternate Text? Alternate Text, often called an Alt Tag or Alt Text, is an attribute of an image that is shown when that image isn’t loaded. You can easily add Alternate Text to any image in your message within the image popup in your message editor. And you should always do this to every image as a rule. If you are editing HTML by hand, you just need to add an Alt attribute to your images.That’s it, there’s not too much to do on your part. Hopefully any serious email designers out there were already using Alternate Text for all your images. For those of you who weren’t, now you know, and you should start implementing these changes right away!

Rob

Among many other draw backs of office 2007 it is also going toÂ causeÂ headaches for email marketers.

What’s happened?

Previous versions of Outlook used the Internet Explorer engine to render HTML emails.Â ThisÂ meant thatÂ designers were able to use sophisticated, CSS-based designs which is why most email messages look so good these days.Â You could be reasonably sure thatÂ if the message looked fine in IE, then it would look fine in Outlook.Â

The bad news is that instead of using the IE-based HTML rendering engine, Outlook 2007 will use the Microsoft Word HTML rendering engine.Â This is bad news.Â Word is useless at rendering html and this move by Microsoft signals the end to many of the tricks that email designers rely on to create professional email designs.Â

The good news is that these issues are solvable, so dont despair, read on.

What will be different?

For a quick overview of the highlights, read below.Â (Note that many of these changes affect HTML-level elements in your email design.)

No longer will you be able to have background images in DIV tags and TABLE cells.

No nested background colors. A background color in a DIV or TABLE cell displays fine.Â However, if you nest another TABLE or DIV within the element, the background color will disappear.

No FLOAT or POSITION attribute in DIV tags.Â In other words, CSS-based layouts won’t work in Outlook 2007.Â Tables only going forward.

No FORM tags.Â Â Embedded email surveys will not work in Outlook 2007.Â Even worse, Outlook 2007 actually strips out the form elements, so your recipients will not be able to tell if a form was there to begin with.Â No animated .gif files or Flash content.Â Animated .gif files just wonâ€™t animate.Â With Flash, youâ€™ll just get a big red X.

If you are a web designer, we suggest that you read the complete, sleep-inducing overview of the design conventions that will not be supported in Outlook 2007.Â Â Also, Microsoft has provided a downloadable validator that will help you validate your HTML for the Outlook 2007 engine.

What does this mean for me?

If none of that made sense, then you’re probably not a web designer.Â In which case, you need to know the following:

Don’t panic.Â The whole world isn’t going to switch to Outlook 2007 overnight, thus, you have plenty of time to re-think and re-work your email design(s).Â Given that many of your recipients will migrate to Outlook 2007 over time, you and/or your designer should obviously take these restrictions into consideration going forward.Â

Email design isn’t dead.Â These restrictions will not bring back the days of ASCII text in a telnet terminal.Â You’ll still be able to convey your brand and “design” in your email marketing communications, you just might have to jump through a few more hoops to get there.

Some Bronto templates will need an overhaul.Â For those of you that use Bronto’s default templates, we’ve already identified those that we will need to re-design in order to adapt to these changes.Â We’ll get started with these soon, so stay tuned for an update.

Test!Â Â You canÂ download a free trial of Outlook 2007 and add it to your testing routine.Â WhilstÂ Outlook 2007 is not widely used at the moment, undoubtedly it soon will be.